Draft talk:Cross-dressing in television

American TV shows featuring cross-dressing

Here are a few key TV shows to feature crossdressing, either featuring performers who crossdressed to play a character of the other gender, or characters who were in plot crossdressing (some of which you can reference here):

• Texaco Star Theater, Milton Berle would frequently cross-dress
• The Flip Wilson Show, which had frequent skits in which Flip Wilson would play Geraldine.
• Bosom Buddies, a reasonably successful series built around two men (played by Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari) who must pass as women in order to live in an affordable hotel for women. The crossdressing would be deemphasized as the show went on, but was always there.
• Saturday Night Live, which has always had some performers in other-gender roles. Coming to mind quickly is John Belushi as Liz Taylor, although that may have only been a single instance. (I'm pretty sure from the original cast that Garrett Morris played a black woman whenever one was called for, but can't name any immediately off of my mind]]), John Goodman as Linda Tripp, and.... oh, wait, here's a slide show of some of the ones after the initial cast.
• For a double hit Friends had Kathleen Turner in a recurring role as Chandler Bing's father, the star of a drag show. So that's a female actor crossdressing as a man who is dress in drag.... whether that all cancels things out is up to you.
• I'm not sure that this counts as "dressing" at all because it's animation, but TV animation has included women who voice male characters (most notably, Nancy Cartwright as Bart Simpson, although for an example in the other direction, Peppermint Patty has been voiced by lots of girls and some boys, including young Christopher DeFaria.)
• Just one episode, I'm pretty sure, but on WKRP in Cincinatti, Richard Sanders, who played series regular Les Nessman, also played Les's mother.
• Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro on almost all the episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies, also in 11 episodes played Jethro's sister, Jethrine (although in at least some episodes, a female actor provided the voice to Max's visuals.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 22:41, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Over in the UK, Monty Python's Flying Circus, while they did have a female cast member, relied mainly on the male cast to play women.

There's plenty more to be found. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 15:15, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Overlap, list and title issues

User:JuanGLP, good draft, but there's a a couple of issues: a problem with overlap, and a problem with the current title. The first issue is the existence of Cross-dressing in film and television which you haven't addressed. If your Draft remains viable as a separate article from that one, that might be possible as a child article in summary style of that article's section on § Television section. Note that that article separates cross-dressing and drag in television into two different sections (I'm not here to argue whether that's a good approach or not, just pointing it out). Also, both the § Television section as well as the § Programs that feature drag section feature plenty of television shows that are not drag shows per se, so that article is much broader. Also, both sections are organized as lists, which makes sense to me.

If you can resolve the overlap issue somehow, then there's a problem with the title and either the Draft should be refactored into a List article or renamed as a drag article, imho. Currently, all the blue links in the different sections identify numerous different shows or performers which are all individually notable, but there doesn't seem to be any content that talks about cross-dressing in television itself, like a book, or at least a book chapter, journal article, or other reliable source. With that profile, that is something that could work better as a list article, and it's not coincidental imho that the other article does exactly that.

Another issue with the title comes from the scope: of the content: is the draft about cross-dressing generally, or just about drag? The term cross-dressing never appears anywhere in the body. If you look at the § References section, the word cross-dressing never appears in any of them as a title; i.e., every one of those references is focusing on individual shows, stars, and so on. Possibly you could keep this as a non-list article by changing the title to "Draft:Drag in television", because at least that title corresponds to what the content and references are actually about. If you do that, try to find some new references that in the same source talk about drag in television generally, about its history, when it started, comparing different approaches, different shows, and so on. to establish notability of that topic. Otherwise, if you can't find that, it will definitely work as a list article about drag. If you wanted to keep the current title, then you will have to significantly expand the content because cross-dressing on television is a larger topic, and predates it by over half a century. Whichever approach you choose, you'll have to figure out how to distinguish the draft from Cross-dressing in film and television. I'd seek additional input from other editors to see how they view it. (moved here from WT:LGBT) Mathglot (talk) 23:35, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot, my apologies for the late response, seriously! Reading your concerns, I do see the potential problems when moving this draft article into the mainspace, in which I will explain how we could solve them.

Cross-dressing in film and television, which is the original article involving both cross-dressing and drag for film and television. When we resolve the problems from the draft article, it's technically forking the television content of the original article. When it's forked, the original article will be simply renamed as cross-dressing in film. Also, I see someone suggesting to spliting the original article as list of films and television series featuring cross-dressing, and isn't a bad idea to do since the article is filled with lenghty bulleted lists. We can implement this list idea for television, if necessary.

For cross-dressing in television, I see this draft article would end up being long, especially in American television. Another idea is to again fork the draft article to cross-dressing in American television, this topic will only include anything drag or female impersonation being shown on American televsion. If there's section that looks lenghty, we simply fork the page again, for example cross-dressing in British television.

Currently, the draft article is only mentioning drag, at the moment, I am also looking other sources mentioning cross-dressing, i.e. Dear Ladies (1983–84) or the list mentioned above this section from @NatGertler, so we don't have to change the draft article's name. If there's any questions or concerns, please ping me! — JuanGLP (talk/contribs) 13:30, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot: Here's an update for the upcoming articles! Cross-dressing in American television will contain the history of cross-dressing/drag being brought in American television, meanwhile a list article will be created mentioning every television series featuring cross-dressing/drag as you mentioned before. Also, the list article will be organized into genres. — JuanGLP (talk/contribs) 23:13, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

The title issue with this Draft remains, as the content seems to fail WP:PRECISE, as the content seems to be entirely about Ru-Paul and spin-offs, and thus is much more limited in scope than the general title it currently has. Mathglot (talk) 09:25, 10 May 2024 (UTC)